Jul 15 2023

Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels

Category: Cyber surveillance — disc7 @ 12:06 pm
Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:

While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.

“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”

[…]

While self-driving services like Waymo and Cruise have yet to achieve the same level of market penetration as Ring, the wide range of video they capture while completing their routes presents other opportunities. In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloomberg’s review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.

In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time.

The Race to Create the Autonomous Car

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Tags: Autonomous Car, cars, crime, law enforcement, privacy, Self-Driving Cars, surveillance

Apr 26 2022

Anomaly Six, a US surveillance firm that tracks roughly 3 billion devices in real-time

Category: Cyber surveillance — DISC @ 8:32 am
Anomaly Six, a US surveillance firm that tracks roughly 3 billion devices in real-time

An interesting article published by The Intercept reveals the secretive business of a US surveillance firm named Anomaly Six.

When we speak about the secretive business of surveillance businesses we often refer to the powerful tools developed by Israeli firms like NSO Group and Candiru, but many other firms operates in the shadow like the US company Anomaly Six (aka A6).

According to an interesting analysis published by The Intercept, Anomaly Six is a secretive government contractor that claims to monitor billions of phones worldwide.

While Russia was invading Ukraine in February, two unknown surveillance startups, Anomaly Six and Zignal Labs joined forces to provide powerful surveillance services.

Zignal Labs is a company that provides social media surveillance, combining its analysis with capabilities of A6, the U.S. government was able to spy on Russian the army before the invasion.

“According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population.” reads the article published by The Intercept. “The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction.”

The capabilities claimed by the surveillance firm are worrisome, a government contractor can spy on Americans and pass gathered data to the US intelligence agencies.

The source that provided the information on the secretive surveillance firms to The Intercept said that Zignal Labs violated Twitter’s terms of service to gather intelligence, but the company refused any accusation.

A6, unlike other surveillance firms, harvests only GPS pinpoints and data it provides allows to surveil roughly 230 million devices on an average day. A6 is able to access GPS measurements gathered through covert partnerships with “thousands” of apps. A6 also claimed to have amassed a huge quantity of information on people, it has gathered over 2 billion email addresses and other personal details for these individuals.

These data were voluntarily shared by mobile users when signing up for smartphone apps, a company spokesman explained that users agree on everything without reading the end-user license agreement.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics

Tags: surveillance

Oct 08 2008

Skype and Information Privacy

Category: Information Privacy — DISC @ 1:00 am

According to an SF chronicle article by Peter Svensson (Oct 3, 2008, pg. c4) “A Canadian researcher (Nart Villeneuve) has discovered that the Chinese version of eBay Inc.’s Skype communication software snoops on text chats that contain keywords like “democracy”. “

In other words, the Chinese version of Skype was used for surveillance of text messages between two users. Researcher Nart Villeneuve not only found that the application was filtering specific words but that it was also passing the messages caught by the filters to other servers. Because of poor security on those servers, Nart was able to recover more than a million messages from those servers.

Well, based on Skype’s previous claim that messages between two systems are encrypted and only public keys on those systems can decrypt those messages, this is questionable. Also, this revelation does not agree with Skype’s claim that software discards the filtered messages.

Now the question arises that how do we know that our text messages on Skype are not being tapped in the United States?

Are privacy and security laws only applicable to consumers but not the corporations? If that’s true then our state of security and privacy is in pretty dire shape. It seems like consumers’ information is for sale to the higher bidder without our consent or appropriate compensation.

Without any credible evidence, our Govt. should not be able to perform wholesale surveillance (profiling) for the sake of security. We are building a society of fear where everybody is under surveillance and is a suspect until proven innocent, which sounds like we are living in a police state.

Laws of secrecy and unnecessary surveillance will ultimately diminish the fundamentals of democracy. To lift the cloud of secrecy behind these sorts of initiatives the public needs to put pressure on their public representatives to dig out the truth. Otherwise the mound of voluminous data from surveillance can be used to harass innocent people and be used as a tool to distract from reality.

We cannot expect our information to be secure unless we trust our Govt. to protect our privacy and corporations to secure our information.

Skype’s China Spying Uncovered
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60SFGH3lxLg


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Tags: compensation, credible evidence, democracy, dire shape, encrypted, filtering, poor security, reality, snoops, surveillance, voluminous